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afabbro writes "GM stated that the 2011 Buick Regal will have the auto industry's fastest processor: 128Mhz, and 3MB of flash. 'Three meg of flash memory and 128MHz clock speed doesn't sound like a lot in terms of computing power until you consider the environment these controllers have to live in. Our controllers are made to operate reliably up to 260 degrees (127C) and down to -40 degrees (-40C) for the life of the vehicle.'"

128MHZ for a rugged CPU for automotive use is a good thing, but clock speed is just one of many factors. TFA was a tad light on information and worded as an ad (which is to be expected from GM's press website), but other than just mentioning vague details and the fact that Freescale made it, this doesn't really mean much without factoring in other details.

Will this mean the 2011 Regal will be leaps and bounds over the 2010? Yes. How much is debatable.

Will this matter in the total scheme of automotive technology? Not really. ECMs have been improving each year, so the 2011 Regal may have a bump in the control CPU's clock speed, but perhaps some other car maker would have a different architecture in place (multiple modules controlling different functions such as PATS/antitheft, O2 sensor, fuel sensor [1], etc.)

Will other car companies have improvements in their technology? Assuredly. Ford has some new engines going in the mainstream line of vehicles. Other vehicle makers may be bringing diesels to the US.

The big question in all of this: Is there a car example I can go on here?

[1]: I'm sure all cars in the US will eventually be going Flex-Fuel (talk about bumping gasoline from 10% to 15% is happening in some places here in the US), so having the circuitry in place to handle varying amounts of ethanol will be crucial.

It's a special use, being more like a very powerful microcontroller, it only needs so much power, and it has to last. While the average life of a car is nearly 10 years, it's not so terribly uncommon to keep a car going for almost 20 years, in contrast very few 20 year old PCs are still in regular use, I think a lot of people would be very hard pressed to find a ten year old computer being used daily, and PCs don't have to worry much about environmental factors.

If the system is flex-fuel, it has to be able to take any range from 0% (occasional exemption from ethanol) to 85% ethanol. There is no control over what what the next tank will have, and you'll have some residual, making your ratio almost constantly varying.

I thought most of ethanol's benefits were pretty reasonably debunked, at least corn ethanol anyway.

Are they not using 20 y/o technology? I'm suspecting that they have just ruggedized a 20 year old processor/architecture for their use. Isn't the military doing the same? (Think about the P1's being used in aircraft)

Haha...you ever work in corporate IT? They are so damn cheap it's hilarious what they will do to keep those machines going. It's especially amusing seeing how much they would rather have me bill them to keep that machine going rather than just replacing it. At least those caps & PSU have to die some day!

Oh, and ethanol has pretty much been a scam for corn farmers from day one. Still a bit annoyed they put ethanol in regular gasoline because it's fractionally cleaner. Fractionally cleaner in a sense th

They are so damn cheap it's hilarious what they will do to keep those machines going.

It's almost always because it would be far, far more expensive to replace an old PC than keep it running.

Have you got the couple of million $local_currency that it could cost to replace an aging 486-DX100 - and the custom software that won't run on anything faster, the custom IO cards that drive the multi-million piece of machinery it controls, *and* all the approvals process to make sure it's not going to break anything o

No to mention the fact that in pretty much any corporate culture, it's hundreds of times easier to get a PO from management for "Repairing $device_that_we_already_have" than it is to get one for "Purchasing $new_device_to_replace_old_device_that_we_already_have" regardless of the fact that said old device is broken.

Yes, I *do* ignore the label issue, because I simply don't care. By 'case-by-case', I consider on a case-by-case basis whether I like individual artists, regardless of what label type they chose to go with.

in contrast very few 20 year old PCs are still in regular use, I think a lot of people would be very hard pressed to find a ten year old computer being used daily

I've got a 15 year old PC that's not only used daily, it runs 24/7 to run a specific piece of software.I've also got a 14 year old one that does some network functions, although it would be much easier to replace than the first one, if it came to it.

So, my anecdotal evidence trumps your statistics, because as everybody on/. knows, if you have a single contradictory outlier, it proves generally accepted trends are completely wrong.

It's the same situation as the original poster where I work. The problem is that the 15 year-old PC has some specialized ISA (or MCA) cards and interfaces with some old hardware. Virtualization to run the software does nothing for you when you still have to talk to physical device.

Really? This is your response to my comment on ethanol? I wonder if you're trolling. But anyways, I'll bite in case you aren't. For instance, the main reason corn ethanol is even financially palatable is because of US government subsidies.

Corn ethanol's environmental benefits are shaky at best if you're interested in reduction of CO2 emissions.

When you factor in all the energy needed to raise the corn and make the ethanol, it makes very little new energy, some estimates suggest that there is no new energy being made, basically as little as one gallon's equivalent being made from one gallon's equivalent burned to make that gallon.

Other plants can be used to make ethanol, but it's not being done widely. When cellulosic ethanol is workable on a mass scale, then the value of ethanol production might change to something that's of a net benefit to society.

Other plants can be used to make ethanol, but it's not being done widely

Sure it is. Brazil has been producing efficient sugarcane-based ethanol for decades, and now accounts for almost 40% of the world's ethanol fuel production. Not that it matters much to the US, because of the quotas and massive tariffs to protect the crappy corn ethanol industry...

Not that it matters much to the US, because of the quotas and massive tariffs to protect the crappy corn ethanol industry...

Being from one of the few cane producing regions of the country, I'd say that it's more because Brazil sits right smack dab in the middle of the tropics, and thus can grow cane all year round on huge plantations, whereas only a small amount of the US is adequate to the task.

Now, *Cuba*... there's a country that could produce *lots* of ethanol. If it didn't get ripped by hurricanes whi

Other plants can be used to make ethanol, but it's not being done widely. When cellulosic ethanol is workable on a mass scale, then the value of ethanol production might change to something that's of a net benefit to society.

All agriculture not based on returning the shit to the fields is inherently harmful. It amounts basically to hydroponics in a dirt (not soil) medium. Feeding humans without maintaining the soil has already destroyed much of the planet's arable land to the point where there would be worldwide starvation without exports from the Americas or acres of land dedicated to greenhouses and hydroponics in the nations where the food is eaten. All of which, just like the so-called "Green Revolution" farming used by big agribusiness today, is based on oil; synthetic fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, all the plastic that it's all made of, and all the energy to run it around. Topsoil-based fuels will lead us directly to a future where only the rich can afford to eat real food, which will be produced on hillside farms in locations too remote to factory-farm.

Consequently, as you say, only cellulosic ethanol is of a benefit to society. The analyses of ethanol's net energy value don't even take damage to the soil into consideration.

Here is the problem: The break even point on corn is roughly $4.25 per bushel. Before the big ethanol push, corn was selling for, if you were lucky, $3.00 per bushel. That is a sizeable loss that farmers were eating on ever bushel produced.

I hear you saying, "well, don't grow corn then. duh." While it would be great to grow the crops that people actually want to consume each year, mother nature is not so forgiving. Crop rotation is essential to farming, and that rotation through the corn belt includes corn.

This progression is to be expected. But the thing people should be asking is: does the new Buick ECM have an interface exposed that third parties can build readers for? Is there an assessable API? Probably not, so all this power will only be available to dealerships.

Agreed, it's not revolutionary - but each generation is a nice improvement.

The tech is new but the design is biased towards factors other than outright performance (obviously). If you consider microcontrollers like the very popular Atmel AVR32 series, they're barely pushing the speed but their technology is very current. Things like integrated ADC/DAC/SPI/TWI~I2C/USARTS/USB/CAN/opamps/comparators/counters~timers/safety-circuits/power-savings (down to nA range) are what's important. The modern microcontroller is an amazing toolkit of modules, vastly reducing your board build complexity and improving your longevity.

Looking at the highres photo of the board, you can see it's mostly just a hell of a lot of power regulators, switchmode-controllers and MOSFETS (for the switchmode power) with a couple of ASICs. There's also a lot of safety bits on there such as polyfuses. My first impression of this design is that there's a lot of isolated power channels to ensure that even if one goes down everything else keeps on going.

1984-86 Honda Accord/Accura igniter units(Fires the igntion coil at the right time), it was more like "Environment as in a home in winter, durability like a chinese small engine, and prices like a haliburtion supplied widget".

If i'd replaced 200 of these things. Yes, i am sure todays automotive embedded stuff is better but its been a long road.

Metro's 90-04 were about the same. The block containing the electronic controls for the engine would actually corrode from the inside out. Things with automotive electronics only started to get "good" around 94 when GM first kicked out the 3800 series that was fully electronic controlled, and everyone and their grandmother saw "it was a good design" and copied the piss out of it.

By around '96 things were leaps and bounds ahead of where they were even 2 years before that.

Try 1986. That's when GM went FWD for most of their full size cars (My parent's Olds 98 among them) and the 3.8 V6 - while not officially called the 3800; that moniker came later, but it was basically the same engine - was all electronically controlled.

Maybe the GP is thinking the electronics kicked in with the xx00 naming scheme. Or maybe they've forgotten that the '3800' was previously the '3.8' and they couldn't find any information on Google older than the naming scheme introduction.

Prices like consumer products? You can easily pay $1000 for an ECU which has, say, a ~30 MHz 32 bit microcontroller, even today. You're right about the environment though, especially when wunderidiots like Chevrolet put the PCM under the hood. For what, to save a couple feet of wiring? To eliminate one expensive connector?

His 1952 MG also crumples up like a soda can in an accident, whereas your Corolla is stuffed to the gills with crumple zones, traction-control gizmos, and eight thousand-odd computer-controlled airbags. On the other hand, it also weighs twice as much as the MG and handles like it, so good luck avoiding an accident that he could.

On the bright side, you probably don't have to keep a fire extinguisher in your car to put out the daily wiring harness fires.

On the other hand, it also weighs twice as much as the MG and handles like it, so good luck avoiding an accident that he could.

Handling might not necessarily follow greater weight like that - a lot of old cars had quite horrible one; suspensions/brakes/etc. greatly improved over the decades, plus now some electronic aid might help you out.

IME Toyotas handle like dogshit, especially Corollas. Celicas are not too bad but have a tendency towards understeer. Mazdas just feel cheap, but I've never driven an Evo with its strengthened unibody. They skitter around the pavement, and yes, I've been in RX-7s. The Miata is a notable counterexample also, it feels like a Nissan, which is to say almost solid (cage it up) and VERY light and tossable despite weighing as much as a Civic, or an Accord; both feel solid (for their weight) but also feel heavy whi

I have a much newer 1975 MGB and it got hit by a pontiac 6000. There was antifreeze all over the ground where the cars made contact and the women said she was sorry for breaking my cute car and making it leak. I opened the trunk to make sure the spare antifreeze was still in its bottle and it was. The only damage the accident caused my car was it realigned the frame. The impact also fixed the trunk light switch some how and another light started working again so my car came out better. Her car had to

It may not crumple, but it can do terrible things to the driver in an accident. Modern cars are designed to crumple (in a controlled manner) and have a reinforced passenger compartment to keep large pieces of metal from impaling human beings. I'll never find it now but there's a great video online of a big 60s era car in a front end collision with some tiny little "send your kids to college in me" buggy from 2010. Superficially the big car wins, but the "driver" (dummy) is almost certainly dead.

An MG actually has thicker gauge steel than nearly every post 2000 passenger vehicle on the road and it's reasonably strong steel too (probably nearly as strong as the high strength low alloy stuff used in thinner panels today) because the body IS the frame and chassis. The things are very heavy for their size. On the other hand a more modern car that crumples far more easily in a crash is absorbing a lot of the energy that was be breaking the bones of an MG driver.

Today while I was filling up my 2003 Corolla with gas, a guy drove up to the next pump in his 1952 MG convertible. Which gets 30MPG. My Corolla gets 27MPG.

I was at a car show today, marveling over the newest crop of hybrids that get up to 41mpg. Wow! My 2001 Jetta TDI (diesel) just delivered 46mpg on a road trip a few weeks ago, and my car is in _rough_ shape.

Today while I was filling up my 2003 Corolla with gas, a guy drove up to the next pump in his 1952 MG convertible. Which gets 30MPG. My Corolla gets 27MPG.

I was at a car show today, marveling over the newest crop of hybrids that get up to 41mpg. Wow! My 2001 Jetta TDI (diesel) just delivered 46mpg on a road trip a few weeks ago, and my car is in _rough_ shape.

Yes thats about right a diesel engine is really fuel efficient which is why trucks use it. I think I read somewhere diesel fuel gives about 30% more energy compared to the same amount of petrol.

Actually it's the low torque delivery the reason why the trucks use it. A gasoline engine needs high rpm, so on big engines like trucks, you either used low-revs which do not generate good power or high-revs which increased engine wear very much. Diesel just had the compromise.
But on car side, it was power that was needed by consumer, and even today, for the same cylinder volume, you need a turbo-charger for the diesel to get close to the same power comparing a gasoline engine. Only in the last 10 years big developments were made in diesel thanks to embedded microcontrollers.

Thanks
I will remember that:-) always thought it was for fuel efficiency

The Diesel cycle is more efficient than the spark ignition cycle. If you knew basic thermodynamics you could work this out for yourself. The reason? The efficiency of a combustion engine depends on the ratio of the ignition temperature to the exhaust temperature. Gasoline engines have relatively low compression, and as the power reduces the amount of air per cycle reduces, reducing the compression still further. This means that the effective compression varies from a maximum of perhaps 14 atmospheres to a minimum of no more than 1 at idle. Because Diesel engines do not mix air with fuel, and so always use a full air charge, their compression ratio is usually a minimum of 18. In my car, it varies from 18 to 1 at idle to nearly 50 to 1 at full boost. Now look at the adiabatic equation and see how that relates to the peak temperature which determines efficiency.

Summarising, a modern turbodiesel is inherently about 25% more efficient than an equally modern gasoline engine. With old and crude designs like, say, carb hemi V8s, the Diesel has more like a 2:1 advantage. The remaining 5% comes from the fuel.

I'm not sure that "efficient" is the correct term for a diesel cycle engine. The diesel cycle itself is less efficient. The thing is a gallon of diesel fuel contains 30% more energy than a gallon of petrol.

No, it doesn't. It contains about 10% more. However, a gas engine always runs rich and a diesel always runs lean, and also, a diesel has vastly more compression than a gasser. Way way up at the top end you have modified IDIs with 21.5:1 static plus another 20 psi, but that takes upgraded (custom!) pistons and rods plus fire ringing because the total compression is ridiculous. Even a typical big ugly diesel has 17.5:1 (7.3 PowerStroke in this case but that's pretty typical.) Or bigger and uglier, DDs are typ

While the engine is running though? Show me someplace that gets 260F for that high end. It's talking engine temperature, which will likely stop working at low enough temperatures regardless of cpu when things actually do freeze...And when the engine is working, will keep warm enough to run properly anyway.

No, the CPU would slide out of the engine and use the roof for the heat sink! It would then proceed to OC itself 300x with a mere 1V bump and a hellacious multiplier increase and not manage to break a sweat.

Uh, yeah, you are. Sometimes you've got to park all day someplace without power outlets.

It's bad for the engine, and a bad habit to get into, but on older cars (good ones, anyway), you could, assuming a good charge on the battery and the starting system in good working order, start them at LEAST as cold as -50F, without block heaters.. (That being the coldest I ever did it.)

I've seen all kinds of cars and tractors start in temperatures getting near or below -40 degrees. Some times that meant the transmission got busted.

As a teenager in northern Canada, I learned that you need to warm up the transmission as well as the engine in extreme cold. A friend of my dad's forgot this lesson and and had to replace his car's automatic transmission.

In extreme cold, you can protect your transmission by putting it in neutral for a few minutes. This gets the transmission oil moving (and warming) without engaging more delicate mechanical parts. Do not leave an automatic transmission in "Park".

BTW - While several minutes of idling in neutral during EXTREME cold conditions are required to warm the transmission, 90 seconds of idling is all your engine needs. Any extra idling time is for only for the driver's comfort (i.e. warms up the cars interior )

Three meg of flash memory and 128MHz clock speed doesn't sound like a lot in terms of computing power

Guess that depends on your point of view, a car travelling 360Km/Hr is travelling 100m/s, so in a millisecond travels 10cm or about 4 inches. Assuming one instruction per clock cycle you can do a lot of useful stuff with 128,000 instructions, or put another way probably about one million for every revolution of the wheel

3MB of FLASH is huge as well when you aren't loading a lot of crap like multimedia, not that it would run Linux but I just took a look at the last kernel I built for an embedded platform and it came in under 2MB with quite a generous set of modules loaded.

If you strip out all the parts of Linux you don't need, you can get it considerably smaller. [ucdot.org] And if you remove the ability to run additional processes, and put your entire program directly into the kernel, remove module support and compile all drivers directly, and so on, you can get it down even smaller than that.

Genuine question here: why do these things need to be so rugged? Why can't they just slot under the dashboard where the environment (I'd hope) is a little more comfortable?

They can't slot into the dash because they need to still be there when the dash comes out. They often doboltunder the dash, but they still need to be rugged in that context; not against intrusion by contaminants, but against vibration and impact. At minimum this means a cast metal case with rubber vibration isolation. Most manufacturers (with the notable exception of GM) have managed to figure out that it's really rude to the customer to put the PCM under the hood where it will eventually die a heat-relat

Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

Meanwhile I'm working on a micro-controller project that runs at 500Hz (not kilo, just hertz).

If you keep the code tight and hand-craft it, 128Mhz is blindingly fast.

My 1989 Citroen XM had six or seven ECUs depending on whether or not you count the heater and aircon ECU separately - engine, ABS, suspension (hydraulic suspension with electronic stabilisation), heater, aircon, central locking (which also dealt with windows, courtesy lights and immobiliser) and the dashboard and instrumentation controller. That doesn't include all the little motor drivers, sensor amplifiers and assorted other little boxes dotted around the vehicle.

And how is the environment of a built-in GPS really significantly different from the ECU? Both are subject to the same dirty power supply, the same environmental extremes, and longer-than CE durability (eg 3-year+ warranty versus 1 for CE, typically). Perhaps it's not expected to be fail-safe, and perhaps it's not a huge deal if it dies after 8 years instead of 15, but I bet it's still built for automotive specifications. Heck, the NVIDIA Tegra is getting used in Audis now; that could be up to 700 MHz or mo

Ummm...they are so different it's disgusting. Automotive CPUs have to be mil-spec specifications with industrial reliability. It has to be when the consequences of failure can easily lead to death. If your whiz-bang dodad of a GPS unit fails they don't have to worry about your engine's timing being spot on every time, every second, of every day, autocorrecting continually to keep it from throwing a rod, and all but killing the engine, or brakes suddenly not responding correctly.

And how is the environment of a built-in GPS really significantly different from the ECU? Both are subject to the same dirty power supply, the same environmental extremes,...

You are correct up to the environmental conditions. The ECU is in the engine compartment and must withstand operational temperatures during the summer that can reach ~200 F. Your GPS may hit 200, but it will be off.

The environment may not be significantly different, but think for a moment about driving your family car down a mountain road. Would you trust your family's life to a device that was manufactured to be sold for ~$150? Compare the result of a GPS device failing during this scenario vs. the ECU that controls ABS, stability programs, traction control, etc.

I for one am glad they are not using the latest and greatest in electronics for automotive ECU's. You need something PROVEN to be reliable, something that AL

think for a moment about driving your family car down a mountain road. Would you trust your family's life to a device that was manufactured to be sold for ~$150?

Humorously, that's almost exactly the cost of my latest set of brake rotors. I believe it was $143 with shipping. I install them myself because 1) its actually easier than changing the oil for my car design 2) If I do it, I know the installer is not on meth 3) I know the boss isn't trying to cheap out on brake cleaner or rush the job

I think the whole point of safety systems on cars are for the majority of drivers on the road that haven't been through any experienced training and/or haven't had to experience wheel lock up or a slide in a car.

To add, I had a teenager pull out of his driveway yesterday with me about 150 feet away. I was on my motorcycle, and it's the first time that I somewhat did a panic stop and mashed the rear brake a little hard. Since I've taken the motorcycle safety course - and was given opportunity to do the sam

I would wager that the Tegra is NOT used in the ECU. It's likely only used for running non-critical systems like entertainment and navigation systems and the gauge cluster. Not the engine management, braking or stability systems which would be handled by a more robust system.

You dont need a high frequency processor to run an ECU.. The complexity of software like win 3.11 running on a 25mhz 486sx is staggering compared to those ECUs. They are built to be safe and reliable, not to be powerful.

If you need more than 128mhz you're doing it wrong.

As a comparison... Kollsnes Gas Processing plant has ABB MFP controllers for control of for instance huge 30mw compressors. These controllers run at... wait for it... 25mhz. They're so reliable that we have never had one go down since 1996.

Well, the factory-supplied media centers that are starting to appear in cars are probably faster, too. I think the point, which was missed, is that this is a chip that actively affects the car's driving.

Because in a lot of cases short wires to the engine is more important than having the unit in a less harsh location.

It also means you wont have to split up the ECU into a processor unit and an IO bit. The IO has to be on the engine or you would have to bring high voltage / high current signals into the dashboard... not a good thing.. AT ALL...

The entertainment packages don't have to live on the other side of the firewall, and they're not necessary to the security of the passengers. The article refers to the automotive module which controls engine functions.